On DOSBox crash there should be created some files called "stdout.txt" and/or "stdout.err". I'm not sure about their location on your hard disk, maybe in the application's (DOSBox) folder.

If so, what's written in these files?

I tried to reproduce the crash again and look for any newly modified file right afterwards. I couldn't find any.

Another idea: Make a console window for Mac port of DOSBox and see what it will output:

Do
• Open the Terminal (Applications/Utilities)
• Do a right-click onto DOSBox application and choose "Show packet content"
• Open "/Contents/MacOS" inside the DOSBox application
• Drag the unix exe file "DOSBox" into the Terminal
• If you've a config file for it, add " - conf " to the Terminal line to make sure it loads your settings
• Drag your config file into the Terminal
• Press return to start DOSBox

While running, the Terminal should reply what happens (see picture).

Before I can try that, I need to be able to build DOSBox 0.72. Currently, I'm having problem even building it from MacPorts because one of the depencies, libsdl_sound, won't build.

SwordAngel wrote:

Before I can try that, I need to be able to build DOSBox 0.72.

I've no idea how to re-build something.

SwordAngel wrote:

Before I can try that, I need to be able to build DOSBox 0.72. Currently, I'm having problem even building it from MacPorts because one of the depencies, libsdl_sound, won't build.

I think we would be interested to see how the current official build will response. 😎

Yep. I'm also curious how the official .app build was made.

From the THANKS file:

We would like to thank:
<snip>
Shawn, Johannes and Marcus for creating the MAC OS X version.

In older versions I added some sort of a HOWTO to guide through compiling DOSBox on your own. 😀 Anyways.. it is rather straight forward!

I found that recent SVN versions of SDL_sound tend to create troubles thats why I stayed with the stable release (which is quite aged by now). So get yourself SDL_sound-stable-1.0, unpack it somewhere and compile it like this:

1cd SDL_sound-stable-1.0/
2make distclean
3./bootstrap
4./configure --prefix=/opt/dosbox-core2 --enable-static --with-sdl-prefix=/opt/dosbox-core2 \
5        --disable-ogg --disable-vorbis --disable-speex --disable-mikmod --disable-modplug \
6        --disable-smpeg --disable-flac --disable-physfs --disable-midi --enable-wav
7make
8make install
9cd ..

(replace /opt/dosbox-core2 with the prefix where you want to install SDL_sound)

As you can see I have disabled everything besides WAV support. That's OK because none of it is needed.

I got the error message now:

== Console Output ==
DOSBox version 0.72
Copyright 2002-2007 DOSBox Team, published under GNU GPL.
---
CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file /Users/foobar/Library/Preferences/DOSBox Preferences
Maximum memory size is 63 MB
MIDI:Opened device:coreaudio
Exit to error: Ran out of CacheBlocks

== Solution ==
Given the error message, I was able to determine that the problem is related to using the dynamic CPU option. I changed the config file to use normal CPU instead and I don't get the crash anymore.